Conventional solutions for cloning virtual machine images can be very time consuming and expensive operations. A full clone (or full copy) of a virtual machine requires reading the source virtual machine image block by block and copying each block to the cloned virtual machine image. This is a relatively time-consuming operation since the sizes of virtual machine are hundreds of gigabytes large or greater, and a transfer of data for full clone of a single virtual machine can take many hours to complete.
Moreover, a rapidly-growing demand of virtualized systems and machines means hundreds of thousands of virtual machines may need to be deployed at any given time. Conventional solutions of cloning these hundreds of thousands of virtual machines is cost prohibitive and time consuming and do not scale effectively with the relatively large number of virtual machines required for deployment, even if the underlying file system of the virtual machines is deduplicated.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for improving the cost and efficiency of cloning images of virtual machines without the limitations of conventional techniques.